Friday, November 1, 2013

CNN Falls To Lowest Primetime In Over A Year; Fox’s Megyn Kelly Returns To Cable News Ratings Top Spot

A busy news day of combative Congressional Obamacare hearings and Presidential speeches didCNN no favors in primetime last night. The Jeff Zucker-run cable network hit its lowest primetime time result among adults 25-54 in over a year Wednesday despite all the cable newers being up double digits over the day before during Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius’ morning testimony. Between 8 PM and 11 PM last night, CNN had a mere 67,000 viewers among the key news demo. That’s the worst its done in the demo since August 10 last year. With the Olympics were on NBC last August, CNN drew just 62,000 among the 25-54s that Friday. Not only was CNN behind rivals Fox News Channel (396,000) and MSNBC (127,000) but also it did worse than sister station HLN (93,000) and CNBC (79,000). The most watched show on CNN last night was Piers Morgan Live at 9 PM which got a soft 83,000 in the demo and 340,000 viewers overall. Overall CNN had 285,000 viewers in primetime last night compared to MSNBC’s 683,000 and FNC’s 2.312 million.

As CNN tanked, FNC’s The Kelly File was back at No. 1 last night for the first time since its October 7 debut week. Building on her O’Reilly Factor lead-in, Megyn Kelly’s 9 PM Fox News Channel show pulled in 445,000 in the adult 25-54 demo Wednesday. Kelly first topped heavyweight Bill O’Reilly on the second night of her show on October 8 with 623,000 in the demo to The Factor’s 578,000. The spread wasn’t so big last night with O’Reilly drawing 433,000 among the 25-54s. Kelly won again with 376,000 to O’Reilly’s 343,000 on October 10 before settling into second place ever since. In total viewers, O’Reilly remained first last night with 2.96 million watching to Kelly’s 2.350 million. Against her time slot rivals however Kelly was the easy winner. In fact, her show had more in the demo than CNN’s Piers Morgan Live had in total viewers. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show was second in the 9 PM slot with 810,000 total viewers and 136,000 among the 25-54s. Now moved from his previous 9 PM slot to 10 PM, FNC’s Hannity lost some of Kelly’s crowd with his demo at 305,000 and total viewers at 1.59 million. Still that was better than CNN AC360 Later (52,000 in the demo and 193,000 total viewers) and MSNBC’s Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell (139,000 in the demo and 679,000 total viewers) put together in both categories.